Watersheds with Adelaide Dumm

[Music] Hello and welcome to Smitty Science, the podcast that brings you research from Palsamist College in the Adirondacks. I'm Ellen George, Professor of National Resources Management in the Graduate Program here at Palsamist. [Music] When it rains, have you ever thought about where all that water goes? Once a drop hits the ground, it doesn't disappear, it has to go somewhere. Whether you realize it or not, we all live inside a watershed. The area of land where every drop of water drains to the same place. For example, here on Palsamist College, we are in the St. Regis watershed. A raindrop that falls here on campus flows into the lower St. Regis Lake, down the St. Regis River, into the St. Lawrence River, and finally out to sea in the Atlantic Ocean. As a conservation specialist at the Winnowski Natural Resources Conservation District in Vermont, Adelaide Dome's job is thinking about water. There's 14 different conservation districts within the state of Vermont. A lot of them are county-based, but they're also watershed-based. We cover the Winnowski Basin, we also cover part of the Lemoyle watershed basin and Lake Champlain direct basin. At the conservation district, I wear a lot of different hats, which is something that I love about working there. So I do work in floodplain restoration and riparian buffers. So working with landowners, farmers, and coordinating riparian buffer plantings, and all sorts of different storm water management projects. So a lot of things that are related to water quality also run a water quality monitoring program through the La Rosa Partnership Program. It's one of the EEC's initiatives. I operate the annual tree sale at the Conservation District and do aquatic organism passage assessments and do a lot of work for dam removals and culvert replacements. A variety of different projects. So it really changes from day to day. We also have a really big presence in education outreach and one of those projects involved being the environment on coordinator for the state of Vermont. So every day it's something different. One of Adelaide's favorite things about her job is the variety. Every day she can be working on a different project, but of course she does have a few favorites. One project that I'm really interested in is aquatic organism passage. I went to Paul Smith and did the Natural Resource Conservation Degree and focused on aquatic. So fisheries science, water quality, these are all things that I'm very interested in. So the Conservation District has a cooperative agreement with U.S. Fish and Wildlife, where we're working to remove eight passage barriers, and we're working to restore 50 miles of Brook Trail habitat. Brook Trail are the official state fish of both Vermont and New York. These beautiful dark olive green fish with bright orange spots are popular targets for anglers across the Northeast. Unfortunately, many populations have been lost over the last century due to habitat destruction and fragmentation. Road culverts, which are large pipes that divert water under paved streets, have been particularly bad for trout. The culverts are often set too high for the fish to jump into, or the water flowing in them is too shallow for the fish to swim through. This makes it harder for fish to move through their habitat and divides the population into smaller and smaller groups over time. We're working on a big dam removal in the town of Washington. We also are meeting with Conservation Commission. Each town essentially has a Conservation Commission and coordinating with them to identify culverts, which are aquatic organism passage barriers. If a culvert is perched, a small Brook Trail can't make it upstream, which is really important, especially in terms of, you know, the Winnowsky River can be quite warm. In the summertime, there's low dissolved oxygen, Brook Trail need cold, highly oxygenated waters, though seeking refuge in higher headwater streams is critically important to their survival. And the thriving is the species in the state. In addition to fish habitat, Adelaide also works with landowners to help improve the way that storm water flows through the watershed. There's a grant that we have at the Conservation District. It's called Storm Smirt. It's funded through the Lake Champlain Basin Program. It's a grant that we acquired with partners, friends of the Winnowsky River and friends of the Mad River. We visit home sites, so we go to a landowner, and we walk around their property with them, and we look at all of the different storm water aspects of their home. We look at their driveway, we look at their yard, we look at their house, and we basically make recommendations for best management practices that they can do. So installing rain garden, installing rain barrels, putting water bars on the driveway, anything that we can do to help reduce their impact of storm water in the larger context of the watershed to improve water quality can be really impactful, and just engaging what on one with people, you know, it's empowering to provide that knowledge, and then to follow up with them and see that, yeah, I put in this rain garden, and it's doing an amazing job. It's just really great. Many conservation scientists are used to working with fish and water in the field, but working with people brings its own challenges. I've worked really hard to maintain a great rapport with all the different agencies that we work with and landowners that we work with and select boards and conservation commissions, having really open communication about the status of things can help, you know, improve a relationship for foster a good working relationship for future projects. Typically, town's conservation commissions landowners are generally supportive, think here in Vermont there's also a tone of, yes, we want to protect our rivers and want to conserve fisheries habitat. Paul Smith College launched a master's degree program in natural resources conservation and management in 2020. Adelaide was a member of the second cohort of graduate students and earned her master's degree with a concentration in aquatics in 2022. She says that not only did the degree help her land her current job at the conservation district, but she also gained a lot of useful skills that directly translate to her new role. I did learn so much, you know, app, pulse, miss in the graduate program that directly relates to what I'm doing now on my career. And that's really nice, you know, it's like, yes, those were spending the money was worth taking all that time. All the hard work paid off because now I'm utilizing that knowledge and those skillsets that I gain. So there's a couple different areas where I would say we're really, really impactful. At the conservation district, we're largely grants funded. So we're writing grants for different projects that we see a need for in the community and then managing this grants. So one thing that Brendan covered in his classes was I'll write a grant and he actually used the template from Lake Champlain Basin program that I used last week. So I'm still using that in my day to day job. So I think grant writing and grant management was a huge asset that I learned also science communication outreach. So I know that you touched on this in some of your classes and I really appreciate it that because I feel like I have a good communicative personality. I like talking to people which makes it a little bit easier. But the words that you choose to utilize and the way that you phrase things and how you present information unbeknownst to you, it can be a barrier. People don't understand what you're talking about. Your message isn't getting across. So I try to be respectful with landowners and not dumb things down, but just explaining from a building block and then building onto that. So whenever I do these storm smart visits or a late wise assessment where I'm assessing somebody's lake shore property, I explain to them one where they're at in the watershed, how their property fits into the bigger picture, explaining you know what stormwater is because that's a term people don't always know what that really means or they have an idea, but it's may not be correct. So explaining things at a base level and just making sure that you have a good understanding on a preliminary basis and then building that knowledge from there. It empowers the public. So the in and out of science communication is something that I really learned and value from my post this college experience and the graduate program. As part of the master's degree program students complete a final project where they apply the lessons they've learned during their classes to real world. management situations. For her final project, Adelaide worked with the National Forest Service Misty Fjords Ranger District in Ketchik, Canalaska to see if Lidar can be used to classify salmon habitat in remote streams. Lidar, which stands for Light Detection and Ranging, uses sensors mounted on airplanes or drones to collect data on stream width, channel depth, and how steep the slope is. Scientists use these measurements to decide whether a stream will make good sandhane habitat and what level of protection to grant it. After my undergrad degree, I worked there seasonally and collected a lot of data on habitat points for salmon habitat on streams in remote timber sillions. Basically I was comparing in-stream measurements that myself and other field biologists collected by standing in the stream and measuring how wide it was for the bank full width, the channel incision, and then with a clenometer looking at the gradient and actually jotting all the information down so we know that it's field verified or looking at the Lidar data that's available. So we have two huge data sets, right, and we're comparing them for the statistical not accuracy, but we're looking at the difference between Lidar and field verified points. And we looked at a few other parameters as well, but those are sort of the three big parameters that were being analyzed and fish habitat has broken down into different classes. And so we're seeing where these parameters are falling into different classifications to provide different levels of fish habitat. So my graduate research was basically comparing big data sets to see if we should be relying on Lidar explosively for mapping all these streams in remote timber sill units. And the analysis that I found after comparing these was that we still need field verified data because the Lidar data was not very accurate. It could give us these measurements, but there was a very large statistical difference between what the biologists are seeing and measuring and what the Lidar technology is measuring. So my end conclusion was to implore the purpose service to continue to pay your biologists to be collecting this data because when timber stales happen, we need to be establishing buffers that are accurate based on the stream classification. And we make these stream classifications based on these measurements of thankful length channel and season and graded. And that information is now being utilized by the forest service, which is wonderful. And they're doing extensive research on this comparison before and my research contributed to that, which is feels pretty good. As you can imagine, Adelaide's final project required working with a huge data set made up of stream measurements from thousands of sites across two million acres of the Tonga National Forest. She analyzed this data with ARKGIS and our statistical software, which she learned how to use during her time at POSMIS College. And pushed for our software. So my scope of work was on a two million acre parcel. I have a great time even conceptualizing two million acres. That's a huge area. So you know, and looking at tiny streams over that large of an area, I had 9,280 rows of data to analyze knowing how to manage a human guest data set can be really helpful. You know, making graph and excel is great, but learning how to use far software really helped me. Adelaide's career path will probably be very familiar to anyone who is graduated with a natural resources or environmental science degree. She worked several seasonal temporary jobs before deciding to go back to grad school. So I did my undergraduate degree at SUNY ESF, Down in Stereachuse, onto the Ranger School and the Adderondex. So I had been integrated into upstate New York and that type of eco-regime and loved it. I love so beautiful up there. So I already had a soft spot for it and I did a lot of internships in college at a variety of different places and then I went on to work seasonally with the Forest Service in Alaska, which was awesome. Opened a lot of doors for me personally and professionally. I moved back to the East Coast and wanted to remain in the natural resource conservation industry and field and I was working with the Vermont State Parks. So all of these jobs that I was having worked seasonally. So I would work doing something in the summer and then I would do something else, you know, in the off season. So working seasonally, having to figure out what am I going to do. It was just hard for me to be getting like a career style job, which is something that I wanted. I know people that work permanent seasonal jobs and they really flourished in that lifestyle but it wasn't something that I wanted to continue the rest of my life. So I felt like I needed to be taking a next step and I was having a hard time, although I was applying and I was very qualified, was having a hard time finding and securing a career style job in the natural resources industry. So I decided that the right thing to do would be to go back to graduate school and the reason that I decided to go back to graduate school was because I would interview with all of these agencies and they would say somebody with a little bit more experience or with a higher degree of education is the candidate that we decided to go with. You are a wonderful candidate. We really appreciate your applying but I got beat out by somebody that had more education or more experience. So I realized that I needed that piece to be competitive. Adelaide was a great fit for a master's program at Palsmiss. Not only did the course topics align with her interests and career goals, but the accelerated pace and remote nature of the program matched well with her life. So graduate school can take a long time. It's a big investment. It's something that I wanted to do, but I appreciated the accelerated this at Palsmiss. I was like okay in 18 months I can finish this graduate degree, learn a lot, really commit myself, and then hopefully get a career after that in this job that I want. And I'm very driven towards. So I think having it be an accelerated program for professionals, I needed to continue to work while I went back to school and I wanted to continue to work. So, you know, that was another piece just the flexibility and the timeline of it really worked for me personally as a working professional and being very closely tailored to what I wanted to do. Natural Resource Conservation with a focus in aquatics. It all sort of synergized and came together to like this nice package. And I'm so glad that I did because it was exactly their choice for me. While most of the coursework in the graduate program is online, students and faculty do meet on campus three times during the program for on-campus residencies. The very first residency takes place in the first summer semester of the program. It's two weeks long and students have the chance to learn field sampling skills, meet with faculty and guest speakers, and explore the Adirondacks. My favorite part of the graduate program was the summertime intensive. I learned a lot in a short period of time and the experience of working closely with my cohort. One, it was a bonding experience. I needed that support just to get through. Graduate school is really hard in being able to like relate to this other students that were going through a meet them in person. Go for a walk and talk about, you know, this is what I'm feeling. This is what I'm learning. Does this resonate with you? How are you interpreting this? That was a really formative experience for me personally. And it really helped prepare me for the work that was to come later in the program. By graduating from Paul Smith and entering a career in Natural Resources Conservation, Adelaide isn't only pursuing her own dreams, she's also carrying on a family legacy. And I had a really personal connection to working at a conservation district with my grandfather being Conservation District Manager for many, many years. So I feel like I'm exactly where I should be and doing the work that I wanted to do. And Paul Smith's really helped prepare me for that. You know, I think if you're interested in working in the Natural Resources industry, working at a conservation district is a really good organization, really supportive community, really interesting and meaningful work. And if you want to work in Natural Resources and leave a legacy, It takes a long time to see the outcomes of a project, maybe 20 years, but I've seen personally that you can do that with the Conservation District, which is why I'm invested in it. The days are long sometimes, but the years are short and it's really meaningful. And it's just a good bunch. You know, everybody that works in this organization, I can say, once to support each other, has your best interest and has this group-think mentality of we're all kind of working towards this thing and goal of this ecological sustainability piece. And yeah, it's just really nice to be in a community that has that on their brain. As a professor in the graduate program, I am so happy to be able to bring you Adelaide's story and share how she is implementing what she learned at Paul Smith's College to make our watersheds healthier and our world a better place. Adelaide is a great example of the smart, engaging, and driven folks in the Paul Smith's graduate program. If you're interested in graduate education at Paul Smith's and would like to learn more, visit us at gradschool.pulsemiths.edu. Thanks for joining us on Smitty Science. Until next time. [Music]